Monday, March 11, 2013

Grand Theft Cookie

On most days, I'm a pretty honest guy. But for the past few days, I've been considering turning to a life of crime and planning a heist. I knew when and where there would be several truckloads of Girl Scout Cookies. And since the Girl Scout Pledge start with the words "On my honor," clearly there was going to be no security.

Each local troop was assigned a time to load up on their cookies. We were there for two troops whose orders filled two pickup trucks and an SUV. Took about 15 minutes to load everything. The truly impressive sight was seeing large moving vans filled to the brim with cookies. To borrow a phrase from the Profussor, one truck was filled with a shit-ton of Thin Mints. This is one troop's allotment of Thin Mints.


Other cookie varieties shared space on the same truck.

 

I didn't pull the trigger so I've got a year to come up with a plan of attack. I'm considering going the Thomas Crowne Affair route. Any co-conspirators out there? Taking cookies from little girls would be almost as easy as taking candy from a baby. I wonder if we'd be able to hit a milk truck that afternoon....

As with last year, here is the extremely scientific survey of Girl Scout cookie popularity.


This year the Thin Mints took a hit but still remained king. Two large orders may have skewed the results. My brother Mike switched his case order of Thin Mints (he gives them out as gifts - at least that's what he says) to Trefoils. Plus a friend from the curling club ordered an additional 10 boxes of Trefoils (he's definitely not giving them out as gifts).

One thing that is interesting to note in the stats: more boxes of cookies were donated than the combined sales of Savannah Smiles, Thank U Berry Much and Dulce de Leche. I think that pretty much sums up the quality of those cookies, although there are people out there that really like Savannah Smiles. I don't get it. However, these Savannah Smiles lovers are probably very nice people that would never dream of stealing truckloads of Thin Mints and Samoas, unlike certain other people we know...

3 comments:

  1. I'm honored.

    As long as I'm going to eat junk, I'll opt for the junky Edy's Thin Mint Slow Churned low-fat ice cream. Industrially produced cookies and ice cream in one convenient package.

    I know the girls don't get their camp that way, and that cookie sales fund a really good organization. I wish they could just find another source of funding.

    Because the child army with weapons of mass guilt-struction, pushing mass quantities of sugar, gmos, refined grains, trans fats, artificial ingredients, and more to an already overweight and undernourished nation, never fails to get me all riled up.

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  2. The rhetorical questions followed by "Shit-ton" has become a favorite of mine. The expression fits everything.

    I wouldn't get that riled up over Girl Scout cookies. They come off as an annual treat. Their price point is too high. The battle needs to be fought on the things people see every day and consume without thinking. Like the 700 calorie coffee drinks and entrees with enough mediocre/bad food and salt for 4 people. We need to stop wanting a never ending bowl of over cooked pasta in a crappy sauce. We should probably take the stairs more often than we do too.

    I recently saw a sale on Oreo cookies - 2 packages for $4. That's over 2 pounds of cookies for the same price as about 8 ounces of Girl Scout cookies (the weights vary). It was damn hard to walk past. I was holding the cookies to add to the cart and then put them back onto the display as I came to my senses. And then questioned my decision about 30 seconds later. This trying to be less fat is tough.

    I think of the Girl Scout cookies as a thank you for the donation. Kind of like a delicious version of return address stickers you get in the mail from some foundation.

    How many Samoa cookies could I eat? A shit-ton. But I'll be good and only have a few.

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  3. That's fair. I've had the same reaction to the Oreos. In the cart, out of the cart, back in my hands, back on the shelf. It's hard.

    And your point of choosing one's battles is well taken. For some reason I keep imagining large industrial fat-cats getting rich of the free labor of little girls. There probably are no such insidious actors in real life.

    But like with the discount Oreos, all the conflicting signals make the decision much more difficult.

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